Muriel Médard is a Professor in the Electrical Engineering and Computer Science at MIT. She was previously an Assistant Professor in the Electrical and Computer Engineering Department and a member of the Coordinated Science Laboratory at the University of Illinois Urbana-Champaign. From 1995 to 1998, she was a Staff Member at MIT Lincoln Laboratory in the Optical Communications and the Advanced Networking Groups. Professor Médard received B.S. degrees in EECS and in Mathematics in 1989, a B.S. degree in Humanities in 1990, a M.S. degree in EE 1991, and a Sc D. degree in EE in 1995, all from the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT), Cambridge. She has served as an Associate Editor for the Optical Communications and Networking Series of the IEEE Journal on Selected Areas in Communications, as an Associate Editor in Communications for the IEEE Transactions on Information Theory and as an Associate Editor for the OSA Journal of Optical Networking. She has served as a Guest Editor for the IEEE Journal of Lightwave Technology, the Joint special issue of the IEEE Transactions on Information Theory and the IEEE/ACM Transactions on Networking on Networking and Information Theory and the IEEE Transactions on Information Forensic and Security: Special Issue on Statistical Methods for Network Security and Forensics. She serves as an associate editor for the IEEE/OSA Journal of Lightwave Technology and Guest Editor for a Special Issue of the IEEE Transactions on Information Theory. She is a member of the Board of Governors of the IEEE Information Theory Society.
Professor Médard's research interests are in the areas of network coding and reliable comunications, particularly for optical and wireless networks. She was awarded the 2009 Communication Society and Information Theory Society Joint Paper Award, the 2009 William R. Bennett Prize in the Field of Communications Networking award and the 2002 IEEE Leon K. Kirchmayer Prize Paper Award. She was co- awarded the Best Paper Award at the Fourth International Workshop on the Design of Reliable Communication Networks (DRCN 2003). She received a NSF Career Award in 2001 and was co-winner 2004 Harold E. Edgerton Faculty Achievement Award, established in 1982 to honor junior faculty members "for distinction in research, teaching and service to the MIT community." She was named a 2007 Gilbreth Lecturer by the National Academy of Engineering. She is a Fellow of IEEE.
Talk: On the practice of network coding. Bringing network coding into the network.
Theoretical developments in network coding have pointed to different possible approaches for how coding can be incorporated in networking. In this talk, we consider using network coding in different settings. In particular, we consider the use of network coding in peer-to-peer networks, wireless TCP/IP connections and mobile ad-hoc networks. We show that there is no single approach to network coding that can be successfully applied in all cases, but that careful co-design of network coding techniques with protocols may lead to significant gains.
Keith Ross
Professor Ross joined Polytechnic University as the Leonard J. Shustek Chair Professor in Computer Science in January 2003. He has been Department Head since September 2008. Before joining Polytechnic, he was a professor for five years at Eurecom Institute and a professor for 13 years at the University of Pennsylvania. He holds a PhD from the University of Michigan.
Professor Ross has worked in peer-to-peer networking, Internet measurement, video streaming, Web caching, multi-service loss networks, content distribution networks, network security, voice over IP, optimization, queuing theory, and Markov decision processes. He is an IEEE Fellow, recipient of the Infocom 2009 Best Paper Award (1,435 papers submitted), and recipient of Best Paper in Multimedia Communications 2006-2007 (awarded by IEEE Communications Society). He is currently associate editor for IEEE/ACM Transactions on Networking, and has served on numerous journal editorial boards and conference program committees. He was PC co-chair for ACM Multimedia 2002, ACM CoNext 2008, and IPTPS 2009.
Professor Ross is co-author (with James F. Kurose) of the popular textbook, Computer Networking: A Top-Down Approach Featuring the Internet, published by Addison-Wesley (first edition in 2000, fifth edition 2009). It is the most popular textbook on computer networks and has been translated into fourteen languages. Professor Ross is also the author of the research monograph, Multiservice Loss Models for Broadband Communication Networks, published by Springer in 1995. From July 1999 to July 2001, Professor Ross took a leave of absence to found and lead Wimba, an Internet technology start-up. Wimba voice and video applications primarily for the on-line education and language learning markets. Wimba is now headquartered in NYC and has more than 80 employees worldwide.
Talk: Incentives for P2P Applications: What’s in it for Me?
Although P2P has proven itself as a viable architectural paradigm for a variety of large-scale distributed applications, P2P is far from reaching its full potential. Peers possess surplus bandwidth, storage and CPU resources, which when aggregated together across all peers worldwide, constitute a huge, untapped resource pool. The success of future P2P applications ultimately depends on convincing users to contribute these resources, which is the challenge of P2P incentive design.
BitTorrent’s tit-for-tat incentive scheme is commendable in that it has been deployed on a massive scale. However, from an economic perspective, tit-for-tat is highly inefficient, since it requires peers to trade synchronously. We believe that the next generation of P2P incentive mechanisms should incorporate some notion of “money,” which users can accumulate for providing services, and later spend for acquiring services.
In this talk I will survey two promising lightweight incentive schemes, allowing P2P users to accumulate money and trade asynchronously. The first scheme, called Network Asynchronous Bilateral Trading (NABT), is a fully decentralized, exploits an underlying social network and pairwise currency among pairs of friends. We have shown that NABT is almost as efficient as a perfect economy, where all users can trade directly with each other. The second paradigm, called Closed P2P Communities, is inspired by current practices in BitTorrent darknets. For closed communities, we will show how mechanism design from game theory can be used to design optimal incentive schemes, and how the notion of entropy get be used to combat colluders.
Muriel Médard is a Professor in the Electrical Engineering and Computer Science at MIT. She was previously an Assistant Professor in the Electrical and Computer Engineering Department and a member of the Coordinated Science Laboratory at the University of Illinois Urbana-Champaign. From 1995 to 1998, she was a Staff Member at MIT Lincoln Laboratory in the Optical Communications and the Advanced Networking Groups. Professor Médard received B.S. degrees in EECS and in Mathematics in 1989, a B.S. degree in Humanities in 1990, a M.S. degree in EE 1991, and a Sc D. degree in EE in 1995, all from the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT), Cambridge. She has served as an Associate Editor for the Optical Communications and Networking Series of the IEEE Journal on Selected Areas in Communications, as an Associate Editor in Communications for the IEEE Transactions on Information Theory and as an Associate Editor for the OSA Journal of Optical Networking. She has served as a Guest Editor for the IEEE Journal of Lightwave Technology, the Joint special issue of the IEEE Transactions on Information Theory and the IEEE/ACM Transactions on Networking on Networking and Information Theory and the IEEE Transactions on Information Forensic and Security: Special Issue on Statistical Methods for Network Security and Forensics. She serves as an associate editor for the IEEE/OSA Journal of Lightwave Technology and Guest Editor for a Special Issue of the IEEE Transactions on Information Theory. She is a member of the Board of Governors of the IEEE Information Theory Society.
Professor Ross joined Polytechnic University as the Leonard J. Shustek Chair Professor in Computer Science in January 2003. He has been Department Head since September 2008. Before joining Polytechnic, he was a professor for five years at Eurecom Institute and a professor for 13 years at the University of Pennsylvania. He holds a PhD from the University of Michigan.